This is a series of

ethics bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton

ethics bites is a series of interviews on applied ethics produced in association with the Open University.

For more information about Ethics Bites and about the Open University, go to open2.net.

Roughly one in seven couples in Britain. it.

Roughly one in seven couples in Britain has trouble conceiving a child.

There are others who may want children but can't have them in the normal way,

say because they're male homosexuals or completely infertile.

IVF, in-retri fertilization treatment, remains expensive and success is far from guaranteed,

but it's helped millions of people.

It's also opened up a Pandora's box of moral dilemmas.

There have been cases of post-menopausal women having children using IVF. There's one form of surrogacy in which women are

impregnated with embryos to which they're not biologically linked. Single

women or lesbians can choose to be impregnated with donor sperm rather than via sexual

intercourse and so on and so on.

So does everably have a right to a child and does the state have an obligation to

pay the treatment to achieve this?

Mary Warnock is a philosopher who sits in the House of Lords and is the former chair of the

highly influential Commission on Human Fertility and Embry

Research.

Mary Warnock, welcome to ethics Spights.

Well, it's very nice to be here, so to speak.

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